Peter Eotvos Prepares the Opera ‘Senza Sangue’

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Peter Eotvos, a key figure of the 20th-century avant-garde, at Avery Fisher Hall.CreditCreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

April 24, 2015

During a recent morning rehearsal at Avery Fisher Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, Alan Gilbert, led the orchestra in its first reading of a new one-act opera, “Senza Sangue.” In the auditorium, the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Courtney Lewis, followed along with the score spread out on his lap. In an aisle seat nearby, a third conductor was at work, accompanying the music with liquid hand gestures so small and instinctively expressive as to appear like extensions of an inner thought process.

As it turned out, they were just that. Peter Eotvos, the man on the aisle, composed “Senza Sangue,” which will receive its concert premiere on May 1 in Cologne, Germany, as part of the Philharmonic’s European tour before arriving back at Fisher Hall, alongside Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, on May 8. A psychological thriller based on a 2002 short story by Alessandro Baricco, the work is designed to be eventually paired with Bartok’s classic one-act, “Bluebeard’s Castle.”

Mr. Eotvos, a central figure of the 20th-century avant-garde who worked closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, is also a sought-after conductor. Next year he will lead the stage premiere of “Senza Sangue” in Avignon, France, alongside “Bluebeard.” A second production of that double bill will come to the Hamburg State Opera in the fall of 2016.

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Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko in “Bluebeard’s Castle” at the Metropolitan Opera.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Senza Sangue” is Mr. Eotvos’s 10th opera. It’s an unlikely milestone for this Modernist composer: He swore off opera as a student because he felt it was a messy genre that lacked the precision of his first love, electronic music, and his first commission for the stage was born out of a misunderstanding. (More on that later.) But that first opera, “Three Sisters,” based on Chekhov, became a popular success. Since its premiere in 1996, it has clocked some 140 performances in over a dozen different productions, reconnected Mr. Eotvos with his theater roots and established him as a recognized composer of psychologically astute stage works, including a 2002 version of Genet’s “Le Balcon” and a 2004 adaptation of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”

During a rehearsal break, Mr. Eotvos, who is soft-spoken and quick to smile, retraced his operatic trajectory. As a conductor, he said, he had long thought of writing an opera that could stand as a companion piece to “Bluebeard” because he felt that its traditional pairings, such as with Schoenberg’s one-woman psychoanalytic drama “Erwartung,” were unsatisfactory.

“My wife and I are constantly reading, constantly looking for operatic potential,” he said in a melodic German inflected with the cadences of his native Hungarian. “What’s decisive for me is whether I can hear it. I’ll read something and say, ‘Yes, that sounds good.’ Once that ball of sound has formed somewhere inside my belly, I can pick it apart and make something out of it.”

Mr. Baricco’s short story — an English translation was published in The New Yorker — is set in the near past in a fictitious Spanish-speaking country that has been ravaged by a bloody civil war. As a girl, its heroine, Nina, hid in a hole in the earth while three men murdered her father and brother. The youngest of the assassins discovered her but left without betraying her. Decades later, by then wealthy and elegant, she seeks him out at the booth where he sells lottery tickets. He recognizes her fearfully: The other two killers have died in shadowy circumstances. Will he be next? Or is there a different way to settle the score?

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Anne Sophie von Otter with the New York Philharmonic.CreditChris Lee

For the Italian-language libretto, Mari Mezei, Mr. Eotvos’s wife and regular collaborator, polished the story down to a mirror, in which a man and a woman, both unnamed, examine and give meaning to each other’s traumas. The opera begins with their encounter in old age and recaps the killings in flashback. The questions of how the woman will act, and whether she was in fact behind the deaths of the man’s accomplices, assure constant suspense. The heroine of “Senza Sangue” ends up feeling like a curious mirror of Judith, the young wife of Bartok’s Bluebeard, who is intent on shedding light on her husband’s past, even if doing so costs her her life.

The compulsion to revisit a childhood trauma was also the central idea of Mariusz Trelinski’s unusual pairing, for a Metropolitan Opera production this year, of “Bluebeard” with Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta,” a fairy tale about a blind princess and her protective father. Mr. Eotvos said the concept of a Bartok-Tchaikovsky double bill had horrified him when he first heard of it. But when he watched a live simulcast of the production in a movie theater in Budapest, he was won over by the psychological bond Mr. Trelinski had created. “It was fantastic,” he said.

The “Senza Sangue” orchestral score maintains Hitchcockian levels of tension through a nebulous spray of dissonances that at times condense into ferocious outbursts. A striking feature is the illusion of spatial movement, with squalls of sound rushing across orchestra sections. The soloists weren’t singing in that first rehearsal, but the baritone Russell Braun, who takes on the part of the Man opposite Anne Sofie von Otter’s Woman, was there to listen. Afterward he said he had been struck by the lightness of the music’s textures.

“Studying it at the piano, which is a percussive instrument, my first impression was that the music is full of this tight rhythmic presence,” he said. “But with the orchestra everything is softer. There are these waves of sound and then very deliberate and beautifully chosen brass accents.”

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Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic in 2009.CreditChris Lee

Mr. Eotvos said that while he uses the same orchestra as that employed in Bartok’s “Bluebeard” he aimed for a “more neutral” music. “Bartok is more concrete, illustrative,” he added. “I wanted my music to lay the groundwork for the psychological state of the characters, the way a good film composer prepares the viewer for what’s about to happen.”

Mr. Eotvos began musical lessons — violin, piano, flute and percussion — at the age of 5. At 14, he was accepted to study composition with Kodaly at the music academy in Budapest. Even then he was fascinated with what he heard, through recordings, of the Western contemporary scene. As a 16-year-old, he traveled by train to Vienna and back in a single day just to purchase the score to Stockhausen’s groundbreaking multi-ensemble “Gruppen.”

While still a teenager, Mr. Eotvos worked as a composer for theater and film, a world he describes as much more experimental than the Hungarian classical music scene at the time. He was a gifted improviser on the piano, and directors would ask him to play something during rehearsal and then write it down incorporating their feedback: a little faster here, a bit more mystery there.

With the aid of a grant from the West German government, Mr. Eotvos moved to Cologne, then a mecca of experimental new music, in 1966. Serendipity was on his side. “The first day I arrived at the academy, there was a note on the front door,” he said. “It read, ‘Stockhausen seeks copyist.’ ‘Please!,’ I said, ‘where is this Stockhausen?’ ” The two worked closely together until Stockhausen’s death in 2007.

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Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died in 2007, collaborated with Mr. Eotvos for years.CreditDeutsche Grammophon/Austria

But opera was not part of the picture in that early stage of Mr. Eotvos’s career. An internship at the Cologne Opera left him disillusioned. “It was so random, so chaotic,” he said, “especially in contrast to our electronic studio where we worked with unbelievable precision.” But his conducting career took off when Mr. Boulez invited him to lead the newly founded Ensemble Intercontemporain, a hothouse of avant-garde creativity.

In 1986, Mr. Eotvos wrote an orchestral work for that group, which accidentally led him to return to the theater. The work was called “Chinese Opera” and the title — chosen to evoke an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of creative abundance — misled the conductor Kent Nagano to invite Mr. Eotvos to stage it, sight unseen, at the opera house in Lyon. “I said, ‘Happily — except, it’s an orchestral piece,’ ” Mr. Eotvos recalled.

When Mr. Nagano extended a commission for an actual opera, Mr. Eotvos wrote “Three Sisters.” The process took 12 years, but the opera bug stuck.

“I consider all my operas as works of theater,” he said. “Everything is sung in real time, in the tempo in which it would be spoken. I don’t stretch out the vowels, and I don’t distort the language — nor, for that matter, the action. There have to be stories, and there has to be a constant conflict.”

The evening before the Philharmonic rehearsal, Mr. Eotvos had attended a performance of Verdi’s “Ernani” across the Lincoln Center Plaza at the Metropolitan Opera. “With Verdi, it’s the opposite,” he said. “His operas are made up of static pictures. There’s a situation. Someone comes to the front of the stage and sings. For me, that’s not imaginable anymore.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Embracing What He Once Dismissed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe